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Breakfast Club: Inside the morning meet-ups

At the Iowa delegation breakfast, Amy Klobuchar stressed that as a Minnesota resident, she’s a neighbor of Iowa. | AP Photo

“Who here at this convention knows more about Paul Ryan than you?” Cutter asked. “We need you to go out there and tell everybody everything you know.”

Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a onetime presidential hopeful, also spoke at the breakfast, riffing on Ryan for misstating his marathon times (“OK, maybe he just got confused that Bush closed down the Janesville plant, but to lie about your times in the marathon…”) and praising first lady Michelle Obama for her Tuesday night convention speech.

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“I thought Ann Romney did a very good job. I believe she’s probably a fine person,” Dean said of her speech at the Tampa-based Republican National Convention. “She spoke to her base. Michelle Obama spoke to our base; she spoke to working people who have kids.”

He added that she “gets it; the Democrats get it.”

Dean also praised unions to a crowd that just fought a fierce battle with GOP Gov. Scott Walker in a recall election sparked by his moves to limit collective bargaining.

“America was built right here by unions and working people in this country,” Dean said before getting drowned out by cheers and a standing ovation.

He, too, argued that America is better off today than it was four years ago, and said that a Republican administration would reinstate policies that, he said, would “destroy the American economy.”

“What? Are we crazy?” Dean said. “We’ve seen this movie before. No chance.”

North Carolina: Jesse Jackson makes an appearance

Politics went local at the North Carolina delegation breakfast as eyes turned toward the competitive governor’s race this fall. The troops were there to rally for Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton, who is running against former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory to replace retiring Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue.

“If Pat McCrory is governor, he will rubber-stamp that extreme agenda every step of the way,” Dalton said. “I will not.”

Dalton piggybacked off an attack on Mitt Romney, slamming McCrory for not releasing his tax returns, which Dalton said begs the question, “Who is pulling Pat’s strings?”

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx also tried to funnel some of last night’s energy into working for Dalton.??“We gotta get the state Senate, we gotta get the state House, but folks we absolutely have to get behind Walter Dalton,” Foxx said.

As he’s done at media outlets and Democratic meetings throughout the week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson made a surprise appearance at the tail-end of the delegation breakfast.

Jackson gave his stump speech about a “new North Carolina,” made possible by pulling down the “cotton curtain off of the South,” adding that he was raised in nearby Greenville, S.C. His message focused on going “forward with hope, not backwards with fear.”

“We are better off, we are getting better and we will not go back,” Jackson said, firing up the state delegation with his call-and-response style.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar also urged North Carolinians to get out the vote for the president’s reelection.??“The future of America depends on it,” Salazar said. “The future of our children and their education depends on it.”

Feinstein implored the crowd to help elect Senate candidates to hold control of the chamber — and slammed Mitt Romney for his position on abortion, saying it would lead the country backwards and into back alleys.

“I see this president battered from post to post unfairly, and he has worked prodigiously to move us forward,” she said.

“You gotta make sure that the base understands that this is no time to get tired, no time to get disappointed, no time to get disappointed,” shouted Woodard. “We have to make our friends understand it’s time to keep the pressure on. We are on the move.”

I was surprised when I heard the question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? I was surprised that the Republicans asked it. I was surprised that the Democrats had such a hard time answering it. I was surprised at how inept the media was at comprehending the potential of the question. I was surprised at how the public didn’t sense the importance of the question; particularly with regard to how powerful it could be if even remotely understood correctly.

I wasn’t really surprised; surprise would be if even one of these groups did something that wasn’t inept. So with the question out there and being bantered about in the media, and used by both parties as a bludgeon trying to hammer out a meaning that suits their purpose: one offensively and one defensively. What then is the answer to this question?

The answer is – Noooo, I can’t tell you that. How could you learn if someone just gave you the answer? It’s not the American way to be given things. You’re supposed to earn them for yourself. Besides the value comes from what it takes to attain something. So here are hints to the obvious that lead any thinking person to the right answer.

First, think of the question in the context of a scientific or engineering problem, or if that’s not your bailiwick then perhaps as a business-person, a financier, a manager or a production worker with regards to how you figure out what is going to happen next? That should be pretty simple, we do it all the time. We plan our day, our week, our year, our career, our lifetime. Planning is just part of being alive. Humans are just more active and engaged in planning in more areas of their life than your run of the mill lab rat. Thus one dimension required for properly answering the question is to set the question as a planning exercise and not answering it with just an emotional response to your fears and anxieties.

Second, the question contains within itself a comparison that not the one that everyone see immediately. So you have to see deeper into the question and ask what you are comparing, what ruler you are using to gauge your measurement, and against what situation and conditions applies to the assessment.

And the third hint is to define whether you get the same answer for yourself, your friends and associates, other people in your state and region, and the people across the country as a whole. Given the hints you should now be ready to see the hazard in asking the question. The Republicans should have considered these facts prior to using this as a political theme, if they think they did and the assessed the intellect of the public correctly then it may be a winning move; if they did not it could be the card played that loses the hand. The Democrats should be assessing the question and responding with an assessment that either supports or guides their strategy; haven’t seen an evidence of that yet. And the media should be using the question to put political contenders and supporters of either stripe under the bright light of being capable of dealing with much better phrased questions then they are to date.

The public needs to engage in their individual assessments to determine what it informs them about the qualifications of each side.

The last thing you should know is that the answer is neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but requires much more than that to answer it. If you think it’s ‘yes’ or ‘no’ then you must be a registered party member.

Obama is only a star in the eyes of the biased media who failed to vet or look into Obama, his past and/or his present activities. Seldom is Obama fact Checked by the predominant biased media. Last night we got so much praise and no comments about the rampant waste of money, no budgets, a corrupt DOJ, Sales of legislation to the likes of Solyndra, GM and the various unions that supply Obama with money and labor in exchange for favored legislation. Our current day media is worthless!